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Star-crossed
The terms "star-crossed" and "star-crossed lovers" refer to two people who are not able to be together for some reason. These terms also have other meanings, but originally mean that the pairing is being "thwarted by a malign star" or that the stars are working against the relationship. The phrase stems from the astrological belief that the positions of the stars ruled over people's fates, and is best known from the play Romeo and Juliet by the Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare. Such pairings are often said to be doomed from the start.
The phrase was coined in the prologue of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life (5–6).
It also refers to destiny and the inevitability of the two characters' paths crossing. It usually but not always refers to unlucky outcomes, since Romeo and Juliet's affair ended tragically. Further, it connotes that the lovers entered into their union without sufficient forethought or preparation; that the lovers may not have had adequate knowledge of each other or that they were not thinking rationally.
(The original texts of the prologue, Q1 and Q2, use the spelling "starre-crost", but the version "star-cross'd" is normally used in modern versions.)
Examples of famous star-crossed lovers vary in written work. Pyramus and Thisbe are usually regarded as the source for Romeo and Juliet, and is featured in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Wuthering Heights, considered to be one of the greatest love stories in literary works, is a tale of all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between the star-crossed Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.
In Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan exile prince Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, fall passionately in love – but the gods order Aeneas away to Italy and the spurned Dido commits suicide. Of course, Virgil's readers in Rome in the first century BC would know in advance that this love was doomed, since Aeneas' and Dido's progeny – respectively the Romans and the Carthagenians – would eventually become mortal enemies.
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Star-crossed
The terms "star-crossed" and "star-crossed lovers" refer to two people who are not able to be together for some reason. These terms also have other meanings, but originally mean that the pairing is being "thwarted by a malign star" or that the stars are working against the relationship. The phrase stems from the astrological belief that the positions of the stars ruled over people's fates, and is best known from the play Romeo and Juliet by the Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare. Such pairings are often said to be doomed from the start.
The phrase was coined in the prologue of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life (5–6).
It also refers to destiny and the inevitability of the two characters' paths crossing. It usually but not always refers to unlucky outcomes, since Romeo and Juliet's affair ended tragically. Further, it connotes that the lovers entered into their union without sufficient forethought or preparation; that the lovers may not have had adequate knowledge of each other or that they were not thinking rationally.
(The original texts of the prologue, Q1 and Q2, use the spelling "starre-crost", but the version "star-cross'd" is normally used in modern versions.)
Examples of famous star-crossed lovers vary in written work. Pyramus and Thisbe are usually regarded as the source for Romeo and Juliet, and is featured in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Wuthering Heights, considered to be one of the greatest love stories in literary works, is a tale of all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between the star-crossed Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.
In Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan exile prince Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, fall passionately in love – but the gods order Aeneas away to Italy and the spurned Dido commits suicide. Of course, Virgil's readers in Rome in the first century BC would know in advance that this love was doomed, since Aeneas' and Dido's progeny – respectively the Romans and the Carthagenians – would eventually become mortal enemies.